Happiness Question

Mobius Monday Minute

# 11 – Jan 31 , 2011 [display_podcast]

On my Roboform web file manager I have a folder labeled “Happiness” and it’s filling up fast lately.

Just in the last few days I’ve added three more entries. One was for Dr. Robert Holden’s “Happiness Project” one for Lord Richard Layard’s movement for social change “Action for Happiness” and the other was for a guy named Ludwig.

Then I go to an on-line forum and the top ranking thread is asking readers to suggest ways that they use to become happy.

Hmmm. What’s with all this investigative introspection? I think I know.

We have searched the tops of our mountains, the depths of our oceans, the outer reaches of space and simply found it to be too costly for the gains made. The current world economic climate we live in now calls out for the search for happiness to be brought in line with our budgets.

Today we need our happiness research at the Walmart price.

Throughout history philosophers, ancient priests, and modern-day prophets have urged us to look at our own innerds for the answers to this thorny question. But what they couldn’t convince us of perhaps our sagging fortunes have.

A quick search on Google for the term “happiness” yields close to 89 million web-pages. That’s a ton of talk on happiness to be sure. Searching through all that makes those mountaintops and ocean depths look like child’s play.

Speaking of child’s play perhaps one of the best takes on happiness was the spin that Charles M. Shultz, the creator of the Peanuts character Charlie Brown, described it:

“Happiness is a warm puppy”

Of course, the answer to “what is happiness” must be a tougher question to resolve than that. Entire studies have been launched to look at the problem and such are being reported in the lofty Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

It may be getting some prestigious press coverage but theorists still can’t agree. It’s still baffling.

That, I think, is well summed up by Ludwig himself. Just look at how confused he was. One day the famously depressed and anxious 20 century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his diary “There is no happiness for me; no joy ever.”

Then, just minutes before he died at age 62, he muttered: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”

If we can get away from the philosophical and get to the practical I think honest Abe Lincoln hit it right when he proclaimed: “Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

I’ll have more on this question in a later post.

For the Mobius Monday Minute I’m David Parsons.

PS: I do cover this aspect of how our thinking operates in my weekly free webinar series called “Mindset Immunity Explained”.